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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

141–150 of 229 posts

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#142
post #130

The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?

There aren't too many other *masters, but check out RFC-2142.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#143
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing whether a number is odd is done in 3 characters: n % 2 if you don't like the % you can also do it using a bitwise AND, this also handles negative numbers: n & 1 this is equal to 1 if the number is odd, 0 if it is even, and will be converted to true or false in a if statement. You don't need a library for this. And you should not need a library to handle string conversions, you should be aware of the types you…

You don't have to tell me how to calculate if a number is odd or even, that's not my point. The thing is, n % 2, i need to do mental gymnastics do comprehend whats going on. Even if your function is just one line, I rather read isOdd or isEven instead of n % 1 of n % 2, remembering when 1 or 2 stand for even or odd is something I could have trouble with.

Telling you how to do it was not actually my point too, sorry if it sounded patronizing, that was not the intention. I was writing this for all the readers here, starting from the beginning for completeness' sake, at the risk of stating the obvious.

n % 2 or n & 1 is something you likely get used to if you encounter it frequently enough, and at least something you should recognize after the first time you encounter it. And most people should have encountered it at least once because that's one of the things we learn to do when learning programming (but I guess Ten Thousand [1] can apply). If you don't encounter it enough to be used to it, then the rare gymnastic should not be a big issue neither. You need to be able to recognize it because it's in the wild.

If having an isOdd or isEven function around makes the code more readable for you anyway it's fine, especially if the function can be inlined, but pulling an external dependency for this is overkill.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#144
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.

Cryptocurrency is also good for evading national capital controls. Wealthy Chinese can purchase mining hardware and electricity using the local "funny money" currency, generate coins, and then sell those in another country for real money.

So you want to avoid fiscal regulations of a oppressive regime?

Sounds like tax evasion/money laundering with extra steps to me.

You could call it justified tax evasion, maybe. If I'm being generous.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#145
Like everyone else here in the comments, I got major nostalgic vibes from this post. I was one of the snot-nosed kids back in the late 90s/early 2000s that made sure to add myself on my own staff page as "Webmaster".

Does anyone remember the early anime community of those days, by chance? It was such a vibrant community of builders and "webmasters".

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.

> its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is n…

I too see many usecases for the capabilities you describe. I don't see how Blockchain solves it better than "regular" solutions though. Can you give me a concrete example where such data control is best implemented with a Blockchain?

Every single concrete example I can think of personally would work better with a normal database and some kind of Auth scheme which does not involve Blockchain, but maybe I'm just thinking of the wrong usecases?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#147
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency is also good for evading national capital controls. Wealthy Chinese can purchase mining hardware and electricity using the local "funny money" currency, generate coins, and then sell those in another country for real money.

So you want to avoid fiscal regulations of a oppressive regime? Sounds like tax evasion/money laundering with extra steps to me. You could call it justified tax evasion, maybe. If I'm being generous.

It's not something I particularly want because I don't live in a country with currency controls, and I have no opinion on whether it's justified or not. But evading currency controls is a distinct and separate use case from tax evasion. Wealthy Chinese are unable to transfer large amounts of that wealth out of the country without government permission, even if they have paid all their taxes.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#148

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer.

I can't answer that for a 13 year old, but I can for an 8 year old. Minecraft. The elaborate stuff my daughter built at that age is way more gratifying than anything I could have built as an 8 year old.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#149
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still just use HTML.

This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…

I think there’s quite a lot of options for static webpages now though. Would GitHub pages not be perfect for this?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#150
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing whether a number is odd is done in 3 characters: n % 2 if you don't like the % you can also do it using a bitwise AND, this also handles negative numbers: n & 1 this is equal to 1 if the number is odd, 0 if it is even, and will be converted to true or false in a if statement. You don't need a library for this. And you should not need a library to handle string conversions, you should be aware of the types you…

You don't have to tell me how to calculate if a number is odd or even, that's not my point. The thing is, n % 2, i need to do mental gymnastics do comprehend whats going on. Even if your function is just one line, I rather read isOdd or isEven instead of n % 1 of n % 2, remembering when 1 or 2 stand for even or odd is something I could have trouble with.

those poor gymnasts do some truly impressive things, and then every little leap of basic thought is conflated with their work
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